TCELS Parent Blog - Laura Fried

A Young Family Builds a Green Home From Scratch

The saying goes, “don’t take on too many big life changes at once.” Whoever said that clearly doesn’t live in our day and time. In 2013, my soon-to-be-husband and I designed and kicked off the construction of our house, got married, and had a baby boy named Finn just before the New Year. No, we didn’t have time for more than a two-day honeymoon down to Woodstock (during which time our concrete floors were poured on the first floor); or leisurely weekends without our newborn to paint our walls before moving in. Although we did manage to stain all the pine shiplap siding ourselves, and spread wildflower seed in our meadow. Two years later, we have hundreds of lupine blooming, with thousands of black-eyed Susan, Sweet William, and many others soon to follow. And, we are finally manicuring the dirt pit in our backyard, transforming it into a grassy space with circular stone raised beds for medicinal herbs and butterfly gardens, with a big sand box and mud kitchen for Finn.

What’s miraculous about the whole process is that we didn’t just put up any old house. We built an incredibly insulated, green home, taking into account the natural surroundings (conservation land) and our own environmental toxicity concerns (plastics & formaldehyde). We investigated all of the “negotiable” materials that our builder would use, sometimes at the very last hour. We made daily decisions, researching green home building blogs and talking to vendors about products and skimming through product Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). What we discovered lurking in so many commonplace products used in building – yes, chances are, in your home or school – are not only plastic but formaldehyde, micas, and a variety of VOCs.

The good news is – you can find great products to work with – it just takes time, a little extra investment, and a little coaxing of your tradesmen. Let’s take mud for example. Most drywall muds include formaldehyde and can possibly contain asbestos. Murco All-Purpose Hypoallergenic Mud doesn’t - yet it’s only available at certain sellers (we bought it from Tennessee). But, the cement can’t be applied under 55 degrees, so our timing had to be exact, as it was a cold winter.

We blew the charts with our blower-door test (used to measure house efficiency/tightness) at a mid 200 level on two occasions. That number is about 10 times tighter than an old, drafty Vermont farmhouse. We used blow-in cellulose insulation, which proved to make for an incredibly tight house, so we could recover the cost over time. One thing we would certainly do over again is to look harder for (or maybe invent!) a product to use in place of plastic webbing. We didn’t use plastic webbing, and tried to use a new paper/plastic hybrid product recommended by Efficiency Vermont to our builder, that seemed to be the answer to our problems. However, it didn’t hold when builder blew in the insulation, as we had a double wall construction and our framing wasn’t close enough together for the paper to work well. It was a costly mistake, and ultimately, we went with blowing cellulose directly behind our installed sheet rock, which took a lot of hours to drill holes and patch them later, and meant we were “heating the outdoors” far longer than we had hoped to!

We worked with Mike at Vermont Eco Floors to create an outdoorsy palette for our concrete floors – colors that help us connect to our Vermont and tropical frames of mind. A slightly pinky/gold mud color in our mudroom to match the winter mountains and our forest dirt, an oozy moss green in our daughter’s bedroom, the pantry and the kids’ bath to match the ferns outside, and a bold combo of sandy gold and deep turquoise for our kitchen – we think of it as our beach in Vermont. Now, you have to understand that NO ONE in their right mind uses greens on concrete floors. It’s just so unpredictable. Mike and his team weren’t afraid of the challenge – they use an alcohol solvent, a water-based sealer, and no acid wash. Some floors had multiple staining, until Mike was satisfied. It’s definitely a look you have to love – and it easily stains and “patinas” – so this is not for the perfectionist, but rather the art opportunist.

While we love our radiant floor, we certainly need a bit of fine-tuning on the heating system. After a dark winter living in a western-facing home without many windows, we went wild with glass, especially facing south, so our house has a hard time stabilizing the heat (when it’s below zero), and as a result our daughter’s room is quite warm most of the winter. Where we don’t have radiant heat, we installed locally grown and milled red maple flooring, installed by a family friend at Green Mountain Eco Floors, finished with a low-VOC poly-whey finish from Natural Coatings. As for this product, it’s as the saying goes, “you’ve come a long way, Baby!” It takes a licking and keeps on ticking (unless you leave standing water on it for a few days…).

We used “no VOC” paints from AFM Safecoat, and applied a lime wash from a shop run by two brothers in L.A, Portola Paints, in our living/dining area and mudroom. We saved money on our doors and went with Thermatru simple metal doors and painted them inside and out, some with a copper paint from Portola Paints. Our kitchen is hardwood with a simple oil sealer on it, so we got rid of lots of polyurethane, particle board and plywood that shows up in kitchens constructed to everyday standards. Our vanities were built from a fallen cherry tree when we cleared our home site (which was minimal), and countertop scraps made of PaperStone, which we geocached from Craigslist in Portland, ME and Charlotte, VT.

Perhaps the only place we could have “done better by the earth” was the bathroom tile – we got new tile for our master shower, but for our daughter’s we bought tile left over from someone else’s project in a warehouse outlet area. Our grout was even low VOC, although pricey, but worth it in my mind. We splurged for a glass door in our master shower, which keeps our baby (in his little plastic bath tub L) warm in the winter.

TCELS Parent Blog - Jennifer Hill

With parenthood, there is a new vocabulary to learn and master. From conversations with pediatricians, to baby yoga poses, to ways to describe newborn poop. There is a never ending learning curve to parenthood that is unrelenting in the newness and energy. One concept that was new to me in parenthood is this idea of "self care". Before becoming a parent, I was able to get a hair cut when I wanted, have plenty of time in the shower, and go for a run before work. Now, months pass the moment of "a hair cut would be nice" to a much overdue barely able to squeeze it in sitting still for a period of time while someone cuts my hair. This past Mother's Day, I asked for the morning hours of a Saturday to attend a retreat. It was amazing! The focus was on our bodies, hearts, and minds through the lense of parenthood and all that it takes. The retreat was with Emerge Yoga. While there, we had 20 minutes of uninterrupted quiet and I found, nestled in myself, a poem that had been growing for 6 years:

ROOTS

You first set rootsin my wombbuilding your worlds to nourish and grow

Limbs grow long and strong reaching to God - to loveBalancing on the edgesof beginnings

The bark you growwill protect and crackso thatbruised and bityou stilltriumph against gravitydrawing nourishment from air, sun and soil

Become a mostamazing youonce linked to menow freeto be!

By Jennifer Hill

The time spent at the Nurture Yourself, Nurture Your Family retreat in Montpelier with Amy LePage-Hansen reaffirmed that the strains of work, parenting, partnering, and life can be handled with awareness and grace. We practiced ways of finding the constant source of this positive energy by noticing the beauty of life in small, appreciative and renewing ways. It was a great experience to have time to myself in a community with other moms. It was equally great to witness how much I am enriched by this experience of parenthood and how it has enhanced relationships all around me. May you find moments to nourish yourself so that you can keep on keeping on!

(Jennifer Hill is the librarian at Crossett Brook Middle School)

TCELS Parent Blog - Darren Higgins

When my wife, Emily, and I were expecting our first child, I worried about a lot of things. Would I be a good father? What if the baby gets sick? Will we ever sleep again?

But one thing was almost too upsetting to contemplate: child care - or not child care, really, but rather the idea of eventually having to leave our tiny new baby, all day, for at least a few days a week, with strangers.

Emily and I knew that day would come and that it would be impossibly difficult. But what no one told us was how hard it would be to even arrange for care in the first place. With a house in Waterbury and jobs in Burlington, where should we look? As it turned out, we would have had to put our names on the waiting list before our child was even conceived to be certain of a spot in most Burlington centers. So we compromised: we found a place somewhere in the middle.

Like most working parents, after our son Cashel was born, and after maternity leave came to a halt, we had to get creative with our schedules, hope our bosses wouldn't mind incessant and unpredictable absences, and call our families for help.

Despite the overall lack of respect our culture seems to have for the real-world demands of raising children, we were making it work. Kind of. Our jobs were able to accommodate our new and strange hours. Emily's family lives in Vermont and so was able to pitch in. In those respects, we were lucky and we knew it. But it was still a fantastically stressful time, and it wasn't about the lack of sleep or the diaper changes or the commute. We were growing more and more dissatisfied with Cashel's care and we didn't know what we were going to do. We had no plan B. He was unhappy, and so were we.

I mention all of this because I simply did not understand, before I went looking for it, how crucial quality child care is for children, parents, and communities. I never understood, before I was beside myself with worry and dread every day, how much parents' lives are improved when their children have a safe and enriching place to go each morning.

To make this long story mercifully shorter, we finally found The Children’s Early Learning Space. And it was at that very moment that our lives, and Cashel's, started getting better. This space is special. You can feel it when you walk in. We were immediately put at ease by the caring, thoughtful, and engaged teachers, by the enterprising and attentive staff. We knew that we had made the right choice.

There has been some turnover, some changes in leadership since we first found a home away from home here nearly six years ago, but the dedication that The Children’s Early Learning Space displays toward children and families is just as impressive now as it was then. That's why we made sure that our second son, Ryan, would have a place here as well. What an amazing feeling it was to bring him in—squirming and still so small—on his first day and know that he would be happy and cared for.

Child care was one thing, this time around, I didn't have to worry about at all.

(Darren is a regular columnist for the Waterbury Record)

A partnership of families, educators, and community supporting children in their discoveries as they prepare for life's experiences.